This collection brings together 82 chronicles written between October 1977 and November 2010. Organized and introduced by Regina Zilberman, the collection consists of three main sections: “Readings, Books, Literature,” “People and Characters,” and “Other Stories.” Readers will be enchanted by the lively and agile Scliar, who speaks with the characteristic ease of the storyteller, always revealing the pleasure he derives from the use of words, so typical of his literature.
Scliar discusses the ideas triggered by his readings and experiences, talks about loved and admired people, political events, and everyday chronicles. His family and friends appear – and pass, as in a parade – memories of childhood in the Jewish neighborhood of Bom Fim in Porto Alegre, literary observations, portraits of admired personalities.
The texts, which cover three decades of Brazilian history, also elegantly and firmly convey the writer’s resistance to arbitrariness and his determined support for the promotion of social justice. Taken together, these chronicles form an intellectual and human portrait of a writer who occupies a great place on the contemporary scene: a generous and attentive man who wrote stories for which “the subject of the stories was actually of little importance. What mattered was the act of telling them.”
